kind of life opening before him. He sees the necessity of revising the "theory of education." At forty, instead of killing off the nerves, one should be occupied in reviving the spirits. Instead of closing old doors, one should be cutting new windows. What a man of forty needs to do is to re-examine his metaphors. Let us try our hammer on this "solid character."
We spend our lives in a quarry of words. We immure ourselves behind a wall of images. We talk of characters; immediately the mallet and chisel are in our hands. We are sculptors, and our subjects are unhewn blocks of marble, and the form we seek is imposed from without. The chips fly. Chips of what? Is the imposition of marble qualities upon flesh and blood responsible for that grim and weary and hopeless look of the Old Man of the Mountain, which establishes itself at middle age on faces once mobile and rosy? Has this entire theory of human sculpture a bearing upon the prevalence of ennui, rigor mortis, premature
